Thursday, October 03, 2013

Science Doesn't Have All the Answers but Does It Have All the Questions?

Jerry Coyne has been following the debate between Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier on the topic of scientism [see The final round: Pinker vs. Wieseltier on scientism]. Jerry seems to agree with both Pinker and Wieseltier that there are "two magisteria" (science and humanities) ...

[Wieseltier] calls for a “two magisteria” solution, with science and humanities kept separate, but with “porous boundaries.” But that is exactly what Pinker called for, too! Wieseltier claims that Pinker and other advocates of scientism advocate “totalistic aspirations,” i.e., the complete takeover of humanities by the sciences (“unified field theories,” Wieseltier calls them), but Pinker explicitly said that he wasn’t calling for that.

...

As you can see above, Steve never argued that science is, or should be, supreme in all the contexts. Indeed, in his earlier piece he noted that art and literature, while they might be informed in some ways by science, nevertheless have benefits independent of science. To me, those benefits include affirming our common humanity, being moved by the plight of others, even if fictional, and luxuriating in the sheer beauty of music, words, or painting. (Note, though, that one day science might at least explain why we apprehend that beauty.)

I'm not sure how Pinker, Wieseltier, and Coyne are defining science but it's clear that they aren't using the same definition I use.

I think that science is a way of knowing based on evidence and logic and healthy skepticism. I think that all disciplines seeking knowledge use the scientific approach. This is the broad definition of science used by many philosophers and scientists.

Maarten Boudry discusses, and accepts, this definition in his chapter on "Loki's Wager and Lauden's Error" in Philosophy of Pseudescience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. Boudry says that the distinction between the ways of knowing used by biologists, philosophers, and historians are meaningless and there's no easy way to distinguish them (territorial demarcation). On the other hand, there is a way to distinguish between good scientific reasoning and bad scientific reasoning like Holocaust denial.

I have expressed little confidence in the viability of the territorial demarcation problem, and even less interest in solving it. Not only is there no clear-cut way to disentangle epistemic domains like science and philosophy, but such a distinction carries little epistemic weight. The demarcation problem that deserves our attention is the one between science and pseudoscience (and the analogous ones between philosophy and pseudophilosophy and between history and pseudohistory).

Sven Ove Hanson is more specific because he actually defines "science in a broad sense" in a way that I have been using it for several decades. This is from his chapter on "Defining Pseudoscience and Science" in Philosophy of Pseudescience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem.

Unfortunately neither "science" nor any other established term in the English language covers all the disciplines that are parts of this community of knowledge disciplines. For lack of a better term, I will call them "science(s) in the broad sense." (The German word "Wissenschaft," the closest translation of "science" into that language, has this wider meaning; that is, it includes all the academic specialties, including the humanities. So does the Latin "scientia.") Science in a broad sense seeks knowledge about nature (natural science), about ourselves (psychology and medicine), about our societies (social science and history), about our physical constructions (technological science), and about our thought construction (linguistics, literary studies, mathematics, and philosophy). (Philosophy, of course, is a science in this broad sense of the word.)

If this is what we mean by science" then there's no difference between the ways we try to acquire knowledge in the humanities or the natural sciences and the debate between Pinker and Wieseltier takes on an entirely different meaning.

There aren't "two magisteria" but only one. Unless, of course, someone is willing to propose a successful non-scientific way of knowing. I have asked repeatedly for examples of knowledge ("truth") that have been successfully acquired by any other way of knowing. So far, nobody has come up with an answer so we can tentatively conclude that science (in the broad sense) is the only valid way of acquiring true knowledge.

Clearly we don't have all the answers to everything so it's clear that neither science nor anything else has all the answers. What about the questions? Are there any knowledge questions that science (in the broad sense) can't address? I don't think there are. I think "science" covers all the questions even though it doesn't (yet) have all the answers.

If this is "scientism" then I'm guilty. What is the alternative? Is it revelation (revealed truth)? Or is there some other way of knowing that I haven't heard about?

12 comments
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Obviously if you redefine the definition of "science" to mean "all academic fields", then no question is outside of it other than supernatural ones. And I'm sure you'll find people who claim to talk to angels and what not. But this misses the *real* debate over scientism.

A non-trivial number of scientists (using the standard English meaning of natural scientists) believe that they are superior to researchers in the humanities. E.O. Wilson has claimed that things like sociology will disappear once everyone accepts sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology, or whatever bottle the old wine is poured into this week).

Redefining words to your convenience is dangerous. Recently you mentioned that you are a fan of Orwell. Have you read "Animal Farm"? The dangers of non-standard definitions is quite well demonstrated by the slogan "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad". The intent was to express displeasure about humans -- and the chickens were reassured that that their wings counted as legs in the loose definition -- but later on this little exception was forgotten. That's the danger of defining "science" to mean more than is generally understood by the term.

It's not a redefinition. It's the traditional and commonly used sense in several languages other than English, including the above mentioned Latin and German, both major languages in the history of science. But this shouldn't be an issue. It's not unusual that a word can be used in more than one sense. What's important is not to find one definition to rule them all, but to know and explain which sense you are using and to avoid uncontrolled leaps from one sense to another. I think a lot of the brouhaha about scientism is a result of mixing up the broad and narrow senses of "science", although that is not all there is to it, as you correctly point out.

There is another way of knowing. God telling us stuff as in the bible.Its a witness until you prove it ain't a truthful witness.

All these things are the old game of these, what have they done, commentators to try to make superior and inferior grades of intelligent investigation.So they are forced to say these subjects are not as smart and so not as demanding of smartness before they reach their completion.Music is intellectually inferior to physics is what they are trying to settle once and for all.The actual true mechanism for intellect is discovery of principals as the bible says.

By the way. There is no future discovery of what beauty is because there is no such thing as beauty.All there is IS accuracy in symmetry and drift from that.Beautiful women are just correct symmetry and since most are not incoorect its politically correct to give the top a special category called beauty.Christianity can't accept beauty as real. God made everything perfect or accurate and later it became inaccurate. WE just are used to inaccurate shape so much that the tiny minority of accuracy makes us invent a special category.Beauty ie evidence for God. Evidence for a original right answer to everything.

I think that revealed truth (revelation) is the only alternative to science in its broadest sense. Knowledge and truth of the kind associated with science requires work (it is not simply revealed to us) and it is the same sort of work whether we are talking about chemistry and biology or history and sociology. All else (in the absence of that work) is simply revealed and all revealed knowledge has as its genesis a guess - the guess that "what I think is true may be (or is) in fact true". The problem with guesses is that, within a large number of possibilites, they are almost always wrong. Which is why if anyone reading this runs out and buys a lottery ticket tonight using numbers that they "feel" are important, or came to believe are important due to revealed knowledge, they will wake up not a millionaire. Every lottery number is a guess because there is no evidence upon which to pick numbers. The only reason anyone ever wins a lottery is because severe limits are placed upon what any one number must be.The word "guess" however does not instill confidence. This is why, I think, revealed truth is always wrapped up in supernatural and spiritual trappings. A belief is not just a guess if a deity transmitted the thought into your head, or if it emerges from some mysterious and powerful principle of nature that, like a deity, always seems to be invisible and immune to regular investigation.Sometimes purveyors of revealed truths (guesses) will cloak their ideas in the language of science (note how many of these charlatans invoke quantum mechanics these days). However, these pathways to revealed knowledge always maintain a spiritual and supernatural element as well.

I've only read the snippet you provided of what Coyne wrote. To me, your criticism isn't relevant to what he said in that snippet. Science is a way of knowing, but my apprehension of a work of fiction or piece of music for me has more to do with *feeling* than *knowing*. The study of works of fiction or pieces of music certainly involves knowing, and can also result in increasing my enjoyment (or perhaps even diminishing it - my pleasure in a piece of music or fiction might conceivably be clouded by knowledge that the artist is a particularly nasty human being, for example).

Science and personal experiences of works of art can certainly cross-fertilize, but when I find myself transported by a novel or a song I don't think it constitutes doing science.

Coyne is defending the narrow view of science—the one where only "scientists" do science. He is willing to concede that the humanities occupy a separate magisterium. The examples he gives do not qualify as ways of gaining knowledge so, you are correct to say that particular quote does not prove that the humanities have a different way of knowing.

However. I think the overall context of Coyne's post suggests that Coyne and Pinker do believe that the humanities can achieve knowledge without doing science in the same way that "scientists" do it (i.e math, experiments, and lots of data).

Engaging your argument slightly more directly, I suppose one might question the utility of "evidence and logic and healthy skepticism" versus more intuitive and emotionally based ways of proceeding in developing relationships with other people.

I think there is a difference between "knowledge" and "understanding". I agree that we have yet to uncover an effective alternative to science, as defined here by Larry, as a method of obtaining knowledge. But I think there are questions for which finding the single, correct answer is not only impossible; It is not even the goal in the first place.

For instance, suppose three literary scholars each have a completely different interpretation of a poem. In the scientific approach, the goal would be to use empirical evidence to determine which, if any, of these interpretations is correct, and then discard the incorrect ones. However, I do not think it invalidates the field of literary criticism to say that all three interpretations could even contradict each other and yet remain equally valid and useful. That's an example of what I mean by "understanding". The goal of the literary scholar is to increase the understanding of the work, even though there may not be objective "knowledge" to be obtained in the process.

I just watched a TED talk by Stuart Firestein, who chairs the biological sciences department at Columbia University: The pursuit of ignorance, where he says " “Answers create questions, We may commonly think that we begin with ignorance and we gain knowledge [but] the more critical step in the process is the reverse of that.”

He teaches a course on this topic:

W3920y IGNORANCE 2 pts, S. Firestein.

Scientific knowledge increases at an exponential rate. Curiously ignorance does not similarly decrease. The basic activity of science is in fact confronting ignorance, and often producing more of it. In this course we will examine the scientific approach to ignorance, primarily through invited lectures from working scientists. They will discuss the state of ignorance in their field and in their individual laboratories. We hope thereby to gain an understanding of the scientific process by analyzing how it approaches what it doesn’t know.

I have asked repeatedly for examples of knowledge ("truth") that have been successfully acquired by any other way of knowing. So far, nobody has come up with an answer

Well, you keep denying that mathematics is 'knowledge'. Do you now also deny that mathematics is "truth"? Lots of people have come up with answers (including the deductive reasoning that characterizes mathematics), so apparently your implied statement is actually "So far, nobody has come up with an answer that has convinced me".

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

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The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.